A chat with Nicolas Christiaen, co-founder and CEO at Donna

Building What Matters - Navigating the AI Era with Tanguy Goretti, CTO of HEXA

"Today is a good time to build - just make sure you understand the direction the market is heading before you start." In this episode, we sit down with Tanguy Goretti, CTO at HEXA, to unpack the new reality of the tech ecosystem. Drawing from his experience, Tanguy shares what he has learned, what he would do differently, and why he has never been more optimistic about what lies ahead for European founders. The real challenge today is not speed but relevance. Will what you are building now still matter as models evolve? With the barrier to entry lower than ever, every founder must honestly ask whether AI is helping them build something great or just making it easier to build more things. We also took time to look back and discuss what it really takes to build and scale a hardware company in Europe and what we can learn now that the dust has settled. Key questions addressed in this episode: * Will what you build today still matter as models evolve? * Is AI making it easier to build great companies, or just easier to build more companies? * Why is the CTPO profile, technical and product, becoming the most critical role of the next decade?

A chat with Séverine Nolf, CEO and co-founder at Pleasefix.ai

Robin Wauters sat down with @Séverine Nolf on the Syndicate One podcast.  "Every day building my own company is so many learnings. I really don't see it as a risk." 📍 Speed is the one structural advantage startups have over incumbents. Séverine's rule: be a first adopter in everything, without exception. 🔄 On being a female founder across tech, finance and consulting: she does not dwell on the barrier. When people underestimated her, delivering flipped the bias into a strength. 🇧🇪 Ambitious people in Belgium no longer need to leave to build something global. The risk is not starting. It is the compounding of learnings you miss by waiting.

A chat with Sébastien Deletaille, CEO and co-founder at Rosa

Robin Wauters sat down with @Sebastien Deletaille on the Syndicate One podcast "I like the idea that with few people, you can build something that scales and impacts millions." 📍 Great teams on the wrong market go nowhere. Sebastien watched sharper engineers than him get outpaced by someone on a better wave. Market choice, he argues, is what separates the top league from the rest. 🔄 On picking investors: skip the success stories. Talk to the founders who returned one and a half times. They are the ones who will tell you what a fund is really like when things get hard. 🇧🇪 On ecosystems: cities work because proximity creates serendipity. What Ghent built, Brussels can replicate, but it needs participants, not just leaders.

A chat with Laurent Hublet, Brussels Minister for Employment, Economy, and Digital Economy

Robin Wauters sat down with Laurent Hublet on the Syndicate One podcast: "I have 1,200 days to deliver impact. My focus is making the best out of every one of them." 📍 Laurent Hublet got a call on a Friday the 13th and had an hour to decide whether to become Brussels Minister for Economy, Employment and Digital Economy. He called his wife from a client call and said yes. 🔄 Six weeks later, his team had compressed a three-month budget process into five weeks, hired staff from scratch, and launched a government that Brussels had been waiting 18 months for. 🇧🇪 Brussels is one of the five largest power centers in the world, which makes what happens here on cyber, AI and democratic governance matter well beyond the city limits.

A chat with Serge Morel, co-founder and CTO at Powernaut

Serge Morel, co-founder and CTO at Powernaut, is reinventing how energy systems work from Wintercircus (where else?). He talks us through: 🚀 Getting top talents to join and work toward the bigger purpose 🌎 How remote hiring helps bring diversity into a (local) bubble 📌 How growth also comes from product breadth, ... and more!